I spent a happy Women’s Day sorting and dispatching books at the Lebone Centre last Friday. Nothing better than being able to put books in the hands of children.
I spent a happy Women’s Day sorting and dispatching books at the Lebone Centre last Friday. Nothing better than being able to put books in the hands of children.
Let me fill you in on some of the stats (in the hope that you will find it exciting and not boring).
Through generous donations from Times Media, Wimpy and Cambridge Publishers, all working in partnership with the Nal’ibali Reading for Enjoyment initiative, we have been able to give out the following brand-new children’s books so far:
* 120 isiXhosa story books to six Nal’ibali reading clubs (four in Grahamstown and two in Bathurst)
* 75 Afrikaans story books to three Nal’ibali reading clubs
* 25 English story books about South African wild animals
*100 hard-cover collections of Sunday Times short stories for children in English
* 500 Sunday Times soft cover short story collections in Afrikaans.
Add to this the books that will soon be going home on a weekly rotational basis with the young participants of Project Read, the soft-cover Sunday Times short stories in isiXhosa to be handed out at the Puku Story Festival in early September, the growing emergence of school libraries, second-hand children’s book donations that are channelled via the Lebone Centre’s book depot to classroom libraries, the work of community libraries, Nal’ibali newspaper supplements, the FundZa teen novels on Mxit, etc. and we are beginning to populate the environment with that which is essential to building a culture of reading: books, stories and interesting reading material.
As David Harrison, director of the DG Murray Trust (one of the main backers of the Nal’ibali campaign) said in his recent opinion piece in The Herald, “We know that you don’t evoke a culture of reading by telling people what to do, but by enabling them to do it.”
Putting books into homes, libraries and community groups is part of that process of enablement.
And while Harrison also says, “We can’t yet claim a tsunami of public support”, he is confident that, “the wave is now big enough to surf on and keeps growing”. He is talking about the many reading clubs that are being established under the banner of Nal’ibali, as well as the focus on multilingualism, the value of story-telling, the need to make reading fun, and the distribution of reading material.
Here in Grahamstown we are doing what we can to make the wave grow bigger.
